What I think would be wonderful for the community to work towards
overtime and what I think would also help Seaside in garnering a
potentially larger share of distributed applications. Would be a nice,
documented, deployable, end-to-end Squeak stack for distributed
applications.
(Yes no "Web" in that expression. :)
It would be nice if on the server side we have Squeak/Smalltalk/Seaside
and on the client a nice, easily installable, well tested, Squeak
browser plugin for delivering rich apps on the client side. No need for
flash, flex, silverlight, etc. A completely open source end-to-end
solution for rich distributed applications.
Have good documentation for all the standard deployment solutions.
All Squeak/Smalltalk stack.
Seaside - Squeak-plugin
Seaside
Persistence options
in-image
and if desired or necessary -
Magma
Glorp-Gemstone, etc.
Squeak-plugin
Degrading to Ajax
Degrading to Non-Ajax
Nobody offers a complete stack like that in the open source world. You
could have the possibility of rich distributed apps and all in Squeak.
You can't do that in Python, Ruby, Perl, etc. (Okay maybe Java, but
yuck. I don't like sites which use Java in the client. And thats my
opinion as a consumer, not developer.)
Most of the tools are already there. We just need to clean up the stack,
polish it, document it better.
Now, I don't really know much about the Squeak-plugin. And I don't know
how ready for primetime it is and if it is ready yet to compete with
Flash/Flex. But it would be nice for that day to come. I also don't know
what the implications would be to using the plugin for a Seaside
application.
It would be absolutely fantastic if one day we can deploy and the web
browser (if being used to access the site) would simply open up the app
in an independent squeak process and not in an in-browser-plugin. That
way the browser won't take down the Squeak app if it decides to crash.
Maybe this could be something to think about. Maybe Seaside 3.0 :)
What do we want included in a Squeak/Smalltalk/Seaside stack?
Can we develop a road map to get there?
I really believe that if done right, that we can go places the other
guys can't easily go. We can build a stack that they can't easily build.
A stack that they don't have a vision for and no means to implement.
This is an exploitable situation. And can be promoted totally in a
positive manner without mentioning or demeaning any other technology in
its promotion.
We can play just as nice and better than most with any current and
future browser, html, http, technologies. And if we can have a quality
Squeak on the client, either via plugin, Sophie, ???. And an image
appropriately designed, shrunk, ??? for client-side deployment. Then our
deployment options are much greater than most others.
I just wanted to toss this ball out there and see how it goes.
Thanks.
Jimmie